Optimizing shared data accesses in distributed-memory X10 systems

Abstract

Prior studies have established the performance impact of coherence protocols optimized for specific patterns of shared-data accesses in Non-Uniform-Memory-Architecture (NUMA) systems. First, this work incorporates a directory-based protocol into the runtime system of X10 - a Partitioned-Global-Address-Space (PGAS) programming language - to manage read-mostly, producer-consumer, stencil, and migratory variables. This protocol complements the existing X10Protocol, which keeps a unique copy of a shared variable and relies on message transfers for all remote accesses. The X10Protocol is effective to manage accumulator, write-mostly and general read-write variables. Then, it introduces a new shared-variable access-pattern profiler that is used by a new coherence-policy manager to decide which protocol should be used for each shared variable. The profiler can be run in both offline and online modes. An evaluation on a 128-core distributed-memory machine reveals that coordination between these protocols does not degrade performance on any of the applications studied, and achieves speedup in the range of 15% to 40% over X10Protocol. The performance is also comparable to carefully hand-written versions of the applications.